A pair of House Democrats introduced legislation last month that seeks to strengthen federal whistleblower protections in the face of the Trump administration’s effort to instill a standard non-disclosure agreement for use across government.
The Federal Worker Protection Act (H.R. 10198), introduced by Reps. Eugene Vindman and Suhas Subramanyam, both D-Va., would require every NDA issued by federal agencies to include a statement of federal employees’ whistleblower protection rights adjacent to each signature line in the document. Agencies would need preclearance from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel before deploying an NDA, and OSC would create a public repository of every NDA in use.
In the biggest departure from existing policy, federal employes removed or disciplined for violating an NDA in connection with a protected disclosure could sue their employing agency directly in federal district court. Currently, a whistleblower must go to their agency’s inspector general or OSC and then the Merit Systems Protection Board before appealing to a federal circuit court.
The Democrats’ legislation comes as the Trump administration weighs a proposal to institute a standardized governmentwide NDA for federal workers to sign, and shortly after the Office of Personnel Management in July finalized regulations granting itself the ability to remove federal workers for violating or refusing to comply with an NDA or other instances of “post-employment conduct” via suitability decisions...
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